with Sammy Prentice

The cow named Desert sheared the grassland
with grateful eyes. She reeducated the
soil’s hardness. She would later be reborn
as the lake’s surface. For now it was 1953.
Her best friend was the suffering sea. A sturdy
youth named Yiping led her up the mountain.
Is he still my uncle? With every year,
cuts of time raise him from dust. Me —
I will wrest this life into what is not nothing.
Send a hangnail into exile! An empire declines;
I go to shop again, prepared to be reborn
as an aluminum mop in the calloused hands
of a Henan tailor as he sees his tired face
mirrored in soapy water, on the factory floor.